Somewhere near you there is a weather station. Someone writes down how hot it got, how cold it got at night, and how much rain fell.
Do that every day for a year and you have something useful. You can compare this year to last year, or to 1960.
Miss half the days and you cannot.
The Philippines Has 34 Of These Stations
They are in a big worldwide list kept by the United States weather service. The Philippine ones go back to 1945. Aparri, Baguio up in the mountains, Manila, Cebu, Surigao, and more.
That sounds like plenty. And it is — if the stations finish the year.
They Used To Finish. Now They Do Not.
I counted a year as finished if the station wrote down the night temperature on at least 330 days out of 365.
In the late 1960s, 98.36% of the stations that reported managed that. Nearly all of them.
In the early 2020s, 2.25% did.
Here is the part that surprised me. It is not because stations shut down. There are actually more now: 89 station-years in 2020–24 against 61 in 1965–69.
More stations. Fewer finished years.
And 11 of the 34 stations have never finished a single year. Not one, in the whole record.
Why This Wrecks The Obvious Question
The question everyone wants answered is simple: are the nights getting hotter?
To answer it fairly you need the same station measured then and now. If you compare old stations to different new ones, you are measuring which stations existed, not the weather.
So I asked for stations with 15 finished years in 1961–90 and 15 in 1996–2025.
1 station passed. Out of 34.
What That One Station Says
It is Surigao. Its nights got warmer by 0.6°C.
And the hot nights — nights that never drop below 25°C — went from about 30 a year to about 74. That is 44 more sticky nights every year.
But one town is one town. I am not going to turn that into a number for the whole country, because there is no second station to check it against.
The Archive Throws Some Numbers Away, And You Should Too
Next to every value there is a single letter. Blank means the number passed all the checks. A letter means it failed one.
13,136 Philippine values carry a letter. Most of them — 94.91% — failed the duplicate check: the same number repeated where it should not repeat.
If you read the numbers and ignore the letters, you keep every one of those. They look like data. They are not.
Three Things I Cannot Tell You
Whether the whole country got hotter. One station cannot say. The missing answer is the point of this page, not a hole in it.
Why the days went missing. The file records that a day is missing. It does not record why. A change in reporting habits and a backlog of un-typed paper would look exactly the same here.
What the weather was on the missing days. Nobody wrote it down. A model will happily fill it in; a thermometer will not.
Want to see all the charts and data tables?
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